


Ante

by apparitionism



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: F/F, Season 2-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-02
Updated: 2014-07-02
Packaged: 2018-02-07 04:19:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1884903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apparitionism/pseuds/apparitionism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a silly little thing, set in the season-2 idyll of H.G.'s reinstatement. Card games can be fun... if you're lucky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ante

It was a simple poker game—or so had been the intention. The complication was the presence in it of an unusual chip, the “lucky chip” of a particular poker champion. That chip had come to represent things that poker chips did not normally stand for: it could of course serve the traditional function of signifying a particular dollar amount, but only if those dollars were what the player in final possession of the chip wanted most to win from the others at the table. If that player were to be interested in something else, however… well, that player could be quite lucky in more ways than one, for that player would receive from the other players a desired boon. The met desire could not be pernicious—the chip acquired its power during a friendly game and was thus quite good-natured—but it would be expeditiously fulfilled.

How this chip came to be among those in use in the game in question, at an establishment known as “Leena’s Bed and Breakfast,” was not entirely a mystery. Said poker chip had been resident in a particular Warehouse for some time—at least until someone knocked it from a shelf and then, thinking it simply a _poker chip_ , pocketed it and, in a misguided attempt at tidiness, carried it home to the game cabinet and stowed it with its (lesser) fellows.

And so it happened that a poker game was embarked upon. The players were several of the usual suspects—a Lattimer, a Bering, a Donovan—with the addition of a recently unbronzed, and more recently reinstated, Wells and the consequent subtraction of a Nielsen (something about “villainy” and “distrust”).

****

Helena claimed to understand poker quite well but had, unfortunately, never heard of Texas Hold ’Em. Aghast, Pete and Claudia both explained it, at the same time, which would most likely have confused Helena had she not already become accustomed to this particular mode of enlightenment. Myka watched Helena as she received her education: she mostly focused her ears on Claudia and laughed politely at Pete, who seemed to accept this as the natural order of things.

Claudia finished with, “And then you play heads up until somebody wins it all. Which usually doesn’t take that long, because it’s the rounds of betting that really get you in the beginning.”

“All right, it seems quite straightforward,” Helena said. “I’m sure this ‘button’ nonsense will become clear as we play.”

Myka sighed. “I still don’t really understand the big blind and little blind part.”

Pete sighed back ostentatiously. “That’s because you don’t put any effort into understanding it. You could if you tried, but instead you just wait for one of us to tell you what you’re supposed to be doing.”

“It’s because I’m _tired_. And besides, I always lose. Do we _have_ to play?” She was almost whining, which was not exactly a positive sign.

“Come, Myka,” Helena cajoled. “Perhaps you’ll be able to enjoy the rare pleasure of defeating me.”

Myka’s eyebrows rose. “ _Rare_ pleasure?”

“Well, certainly. Come now, how often do you imagine I _lose_ at games? Particularly games of chance?”

“Are you saying you cheat?”

“No. I’m saying that I am quite _lucky_.”

Pete shook his finger at her. “See, but that’s the thing about poker. It isn’t just luck. There’s the skill! Bluffing! So even if you figure out how to play, and even if the cards all fall your way, there’s still that part to worry about.”

Helena slewed her gaze over at him. “Really. You think that it is likely to take me _more_ time—or any time at all—to master a game that involves disguising one’s true intentions?”

“Uh,” Pete responded. Clearly, he hadn’t considered this, but once he began to… “Maybe you don’t actually want to play,” he suggested. “Maybe what you want to do is watch everybody else play. You know, to get a feel for it. And then, maybe, we can never ever play again.”

“Please,” Helena said, “even if I were to win, it isn’t as if there will be any actual money involved. Will there?” She said this last in a strangely hopeful voice.

“You don’t need any money,” Myka scoffed.

“No, but isn’t there more satisfaction in winning something of real value? Rather than small pieces of—” and here she gestured at the piles of poker chips that Claudia was in the process of unloading from their carrier, “plastic, I assume? Or are they ceramic? In any case, I’m sure they are worth very little.”

“It’s true,” Claudia said. “Unless they’re vintage Bakelite or something. A set like this? Maybe five bucks, tops.”

“Except this one, perhaps,” Helena said, seeing and grabbing the odd duck from amongst the red, white, and blue discs. It glinted in the light: gold, then silver, shining like money itself.

“That one looks like it’s from a casino,” Pete said. “Man, I haven’t been to a real casino in ages.”

Claudia told him, “I haven’t been to a real casino in _ever_. I totally call this chip.”

“Call!” Pete exclaimed, and they giggled together.

Myka looked to Helena for support in eye-rolling at their foolishness, but Helena had an air about her that said something like, “I want that chip,” and Myka kept her eye-rolling to herself. She still didn’t want to play, but she allowed, privately, that there might be some interest in seeing Helena really make an effort at something. Everything was usually so _easy_ for her; Myka could see that she rarely had to expend more than a baseline level of energy—brain power or muscle power—to do whatever needed to be done. (It was one of the things that, in retrospect, made Moscow very interesting. Myka took the Moscow experience out and looked at it, every now and then, just as she did the California one. California had a different quality to it, of course, since Pete and Artie hadn’t been there, and they, and even Claudia, still didn’t know the full extent of what had happened there: the grappler and its aftermath, the conversations she and Helena had had, the perfect click and flow of their pretending to be coworkers… )

But now was not the time to examine the gems that were Moscow and California, because Pete and Claudia had managed to get the table set up remarkably quickly, and now Pete was dealing. Helena displayed an almost vulpine eagerness, as if the cards couldn’t possibly reach her fast enough, and in fact, she grabbed her first two greedily. Myka tipped hers up and almost groaned. Not a two and a seven, but almost as bad: a three and an eight, unsuited. This was why she hated cards: they sensed her coming and lined themselves up as crappily as possible.

As the first round of betting got underway, she sighed and threw her cards in. “Fold.” Naturally, everyone else bet. Helena wore her sly concentration expression; she darted her eyes back and forth at Pete and Claudia as if she thought she’d be able to pick up on their tells if she could just be quick enough. But Pete was notorious for throwing out all kinds of fake tells, and Claudia could be incredibly deadpan when she felt like it. Claudia had clearly decided that the funky-looking chip really _was_ hers, which meant that she was actually committing to the game instead of goofing around. Myka sighed again. It was just her luck that everyone would be serious about it.

Pete folded after the flop. He really was a good card player; he’d told Myka once, very offhandedly, that “drinking Pete” had also been “poker Pete.” She found it interesting that he could be “poker Pete” now that he wasn’t “drinking Pete” anymore—though she supposed that playing for cheap chips, or chocolate chips or cheetos, in the kitchen of a bed and breakfast with your grumbly boss, your uptight partner, and a teenage computer nerd wasn’t quite the same thing as wagering real money in a casino with a drink in your hand.

Claudia took the pot. Helena raised an eyebrow as she threw her cards in, but she was otherwise pretty restrained. Myka suspected she’d stayed in just to see how Claudia played heads-up, a theory that was in a way validated on the next hand, when Myka folded before the flop again, Claudia after the turn, and it was just Helena and Pete for the river. “Myka,” Helena said, “are you not intending to play at all? You will run out of chips at some point, correct?”

Pete snorted. “Like that’d upset her. No, we all know that when Myka plays, it’s because she’s got something. It’s all about percentages for her. Except she did try to bluff that one time—remember, Claud? But she’d had two glasses of wine, heading for three, so she kept giggling about it. Kind of a big tell there, Mykes.”

“Well,” Myka said, “I haven’t had any wine this evening, and I’m not planning to. So you’ll just have to guess this time, won’t you?” In fact, she knew that her bluffing skills were extremely limited, tipsy or not. She would have been fine if the stakes were actually high, but since they weren’t… she had trouble forcing herself to care, and it showed. Whereas it seemed like Helena bluffed every time she breathed.

The next time, Helena folded before the flop. Myka was absolutely certain that this was so that she could watch the others play. She said to Helena, “You’re going to run out of chips even faster than I will if you keep this up.”

Helena gave her a small smile. “We’ll see.”

And then, as Myka had figured would happen, Helena started winning. Interestingly, Claudia did too. They traded hands back and forth, almost symmetrically, and Myka started to suspect that Helena might be cheating after all. Though it did seem out of character for her to cheat against Claudia.

Eight hands later, out of which Pete had won exactly one and Myka had won exactly zero, Myka went all in with two jacks in her hand and a third on the flop. “All in” wasn’t that impressive when you had only six chips left, but still. It ended up being just her and Helena waiting for the turn, their cards turned up. Helena had a queen and a three, unsuited; she’d clearly expected to be able to bluff Myka out, as the flop held that jack, an eight, and a six (all unsuited). Pete burned a card, then turned over… well, of course. Another queen. Myka still figured she’d win, because what were the odds, really? But now they’d have to go to the river to see. Burn. Then…

“Are you kidding me?” Claudia said as Pete turned over another queen. “Are you _kidding_ me? How in the name of crazy did you _do_ that? Do you know what the odds were against your winning that hand? Wait, why am I asking that? Of course you know what the odds were.”

“I do,” Helena affirmed. “But really, I stood to lose very few chips, as a percentage of my total, and my losing would have meant that Myka continued playing. As I believe you would say: win-win.” She smiled at Myka, who felt her usual flutter of flustered pleasure in response.

She smiled back and said, “I appreciate the attempt at charity, but I’ll be happier just watching. Now you can really go for the throat, if you want to.”

“Well, children,” Helena said to Pete and Claudia, “it seems I’ve been given permission to—what is the expression? Take the gloves off.”

“Great,” Pete groaned. “Because you weren’t winning enough before.” He’d won that one pot, but it had been small, and now that Myka was out, he was the short stack by a large margin.

“Yeah, okay,” Claudia said, hunkering down. “Bring it, old lady.”

Helena raised one eyebrow.

“Um,” Myka said. “Claud, it might not have been the best idea to poke the badger with a spoon.”

Now Helena swiveled her head in Myka’s direction. “The badger? A spoon?”

“It’s just an expression. I don’t actually think of you as a badger.”

“I’m familiar with the concept of figurative language, thank you. I’m merely questioning your choice of this particular turn of phrase. If your intention were to provoke the badger, why use a spoon? Surely a fork would be more effective.”

Myka theorized, “You’d be more likely to hurt the badger if you used a fork? And the idea probably isn’t to hurt it. It would probably work as well to poke it with a butter knife.”

Claudia said, “Is this seriously what you guys sit around and talk about? Which utensil to goose a badger with?”

“A gravy ladle!” Pete said in a high voice, with something like a British accent.

“Is that meant to be me?” Helena asked. She was trying not to sound menacing, Myka noted, but it wasn’t working very well. “Your ‘me’ voice needs a great deal of work. That sounds nothing like me.”

Pete snorted. “Yeah, but you knew it was you. Since you’re the only one around here with that particular accent, I don’t think I need to spend a whole lot more time on it. Not trying to pass as you for voice recognition—just mocking.”

“Oh, well, that’s _fine_ then. Carry on,” Helena told him.

To Myka, she still sounded menacing, but Pete tried to high-five her. When that didn’t work, he tried for Claudia instead, but she pounded on the table. “H.G., it is _your deal_. Give me my damn cards. It’s gonna be just you and me at the end of this, and I am _taking you down_.”

“Hm,” Helena said. “As I am given to understand the children say: good luck with that.”

What followed was card-playing that Myka could describe only as _extreme._ Pete hung on for three more hands, but, as he lamented more than once, “The poker gods are giving me absolutely nothing!” He added, as he pushed the pot containing his last chips toward Claudia, “Mykes, why do the poker gods hate us? What did we do to piss them off?”

“I don’t know about you,” Myka said, “but I think my offense is that I don’t like their game very much. They probably get touchy about that.”  
  
“Yeah, but why would they take it out on _me_?”

“You’re my partner,” Myka reminded him. “I’m sure you caught your crappy luck from me, and I’m sorry, but I can’t really help it.”

“Why didn’t H.G. catch any of it then? You guys are practically joined at the hip!”

That made Myka blush a little, but Helena laughed. “Perhaps they took pity on me, novice that I am.”

It was Claudia’s turn to snort. “Novice. Yeah. Just because you haven’t played Hold ’Em? I think you and the poker gods know each other real well. You probably used to _play_ the poker gods, back in the day. I bet you even beat them.”

“And this,” Helena said, “from the young lady who I believe is at this point in possession of the larger number of chips.”

Myka wondered if Helena would let Claudia win, if she was _already_ letting Claudia win. She couldn’t quite see it; it wasn’t that Helena was too competitive, but that this didn’t ultimately matter. She could imagine Helena stepping out of the way so that Claudia could achieve something important, but this? No, weirdly, Myka was pretty sure that if Helena lost, it would be because Claudia really beat her.

And so they set to it in earnest. Claudia was up, then Helena; Helena worked her way down to what looked to Myka like an alarmingly small number of chips, but then she won three hands in a row. Myka felt the train beginning to leave the station: Claudia seemed genuinely worried, and Helena became very still. Cats hunting on the savanna most likely gathered themselves in just this way, right before making a meal of some unsuspecting hoofed creature. But Claudia wasn’t unsuspecting; she knew the pounce was coming.

It came. Claudia went all in immediately on the next hand; she had little choice, as she wouldn’t have been able to cover the blind if she’d folded. “Goodbye, my special little chip,” she said, giving it a forlorn wave as she pushed it away. She turned her cards over, and it became clear that she really had resigned herself to losing, no matter what: she had a pair of queens, which even Myka would have happily played and felt pretty darn good about her chances doing so.

Pete was dealing the hand “to make sure no funny business, if you know what I mean.” He had given Helena a three and an eight, unsuited: exactly the hand with which Myka had begun the evening. Myka tried to resign herself to the idea of Claudia winning this pot and the whole thing going on _forever_. She wondered if there were something Warehousey going on, something that trapped you in an infinite poker loop… but no, that was silly, they’d played poker before and it had, blessedly, eventually ended.

It really was just Myka’s luck, though, that Helena and Claudia would have turned out to be so evenly matched—and so evenly committed.

The flop was interesting: the nine and ten of hearts, and the queen of clubs.

Pete said, “Wow, three of a kind for the little lady!”

Claudia sat up a little straighter. Then she seemed to notice that Helena was perking up too, and she said, “Oh, man, now H.G.’s working on a flush!” For Helena’s three was a diamond—but her eight was a heart.

“She’s also working on a straight,” Pete said.

“Not helpful,” grumbled Claudia, slumping again.

Myka leaned forward. She felt a little strange, maybe a bit buzzed, as if she’d had the drinks that had had such a truly _devastating_ effect on her the last time.

“But she doesn’t have either one yet,” Claudia said, clearly trying to reassure herself. “And I already have three of a kind. So my odds are good, right?”

“Right,” Helena said, sounding unusually breathless.

“Okay,” Pete said. “Let’s see what we get. And what we get is…” He revealed the turn: jack of hearts.

“Oh my fricking _god_ ,” Claudia howled. “Now it’s a fricking flush and she’s _beating me_! She started with a three and an eight! How does she _do_ that?”

“I don’t _do_ anything,” Helena said. “I told you: this is a game of chance—particularly at this point—and I am unreasonably _lucky_.”

“Sure,” Claudia said. “Pete, how much is she paying you?”

“Not nearly enough, given that I’m getting a grand total of zero. Although, given that I’m not actually trying to help her win, she’s pretty much getting her money’s worth.”

If Myka hadn’t known Helena as well as she felt she was beginning to, she would have suspected cheating, too. But this wasn’t how Helena looked when she was putting something over on somebody (although Myka acknowledged that it was entirely possible that Helena had faked Myka herself into thinking she could recognize when Helena was engaging in some kind of dishonesty—though Myka couldn’t give that prospect too much scrutiny without getting worried, so she chose to leave it alone for the time being). This was Helena looking… well, she was looking surprisingly blank at the moment. Myka realized she must be calculating odds.

Claudia was doing something similar, but out loud. “What can I beat a flush with? A full house or four of a kind, right? So I need a nine, a ten, a jack, or that last pesky queen. Or, ooh, a king, because then there’s a flush on the table, and I win because of high card, right? Okay, then, come on, put one of those out there!” She was practically wiggling in her chair.

Pete started waving his fingers around, making as if to draw out the process, and Helena threatened to rip the cards from his hands. Or rip his hands from his arms; it was hard to hear her clearly through her clenched teeth. She didn’t look blank anymore; now she looked predatory again.

Pete paled. He hurriedly burned a card, then turned a card.

Later, all four of them would wonder if there had been a small earthquake as that card was revealed; they all felt a zip of the uncanny, a bit of disorientation for a fraction of a second. (Myka knew because she asked everyone about it, much later.)

The river was the queen of hearts.

When the dust cleared, Claudia of course had her four queens—four of a kind, that was, which would have been enough to give her the win under almost every other scenario. But that queen meant that Helena had made a straight flush: eight, nine, ten, jack, and queen, all of hearts. Victory was hers. Myka watched Helena smile. Myka then leaned over and kissed the very edge of that smile, right at the corner of her mouth.

Myka sat back, thinking that she should be shocked at herself—but she wasn’t, in fact, shocked at all. She had felt compelled to do it, almost as if physically _pushed_ , but she’d known such an action was bound to happen at some point. She just hadn’t known that that point would be occasioned by a winning poker hand. It wasn’t as if she really felt one way or the other about Helena winning… maybe, she rationalized, she was just particularly grateful that Helena had brought the everlasting gobstopper that was the game to an end.

Helena turned to her and said, “Thank you so much. Had I known _that_ would be the prize, I would have seen to it that this entertainment was brought to a conclusion far sooner.”

Under the table, in a gesture that had nothing to do with gratitude or being pushed, Myka placed her hand on Helena’s thigh.

“Pretty sure she wouldn’t’ve kissed _me_ if _I’d_ won,” Claudia remarked.

Pete said, “ _Absolutely certain_ she wouldn’t’ve kissed _me_.”

Myka didn’t bother to respond. She was staring at Helena, and Helena was staring at her, but they both discovered, as Pete and Claudia both left the room in an accelerated fashion—for reasons that they would later describe to each other as “did you feel like you were being _pushed_ out the door, too?”—there were far more compelling things to do than stare.

(Still, what Myka said, breathlessly, was about looking: “Since I first saw you…”

And Helena, teasing: “You wanted to watch me win at cards?”

“Fine. I’ll play along. Have you ever heard of a game called strip poker?”

“I’ll wager that we don’t, in fact, need cards for that.”)

Many years after (in a possible future), Myka asked Helena, “In that poker game… did you cheat?”

And Helena answered, “No.”

“Would you have? If you’d known about the chip?”

Helena smiled inscrutably.

Myka sighed.

Helena smiled less inscrutably. “There was no need. As I mentioned then, and as I believe our situation continues to demonstrate… I am incredibly _lucky_.”

END


End file.
